On the heels of last year’s minimalist "Elephant" ¾ Gus Van Sant’s gripping nightmare of Columbine-style high school violence ¾ comes another film about teen violence that’s more ambitiously plotted but much less effective. First time writer/director Matthew Ryan Hoge’s "The United States of Leland," the story of a small group of friends and family shell-shocked by a senseless teen murder, tackles a difficult theme—why we sometimes inexplicably do terrible things—with rambling subplots and a dramatically unsatisfying, non-committal approach.

Leland (Ryan Gosling) is a pretty ordinary kid living in a California suburb, until one day he’s accused of murdering the mentally challenged brother of his girlfriend (Jena Malone). His divorced parents (Lena Olin, Kevin Spacey) are stunned, as is the victim’s family, including parents (Ann Magnuson, Martin Donovan), siblings (Malone, Michelle Williams), and live-in friend (Chris Klein).

Leland ends up in one of those movie-youth detention homes, the kind with a tough-love teacher (Don Cheadle) who’s got his own issues, in this case a frustrated writer unable to stay monogamous to his long-distance girlfriend. The two get on okay, with the distant Leland never really opening up or doing much soul searching and the amiable teacher with a secret up his sleeve—he wants to use Leland’s case as fodder for a fledgling manuscript.

Instead of exploring their connection, Hoge instead explores the domestic issues of the peripheral characters, and the film’s focus is all over the map. We lose touch with Leland for long stretches, in favor of some familiar side stories involving teenage drug use, marital distance, young relationships gone sour, etc., the kind which routinely pop up on the WB. It doesn’t help that "Dawson’s Creek" alum Michelle Williams and "American Pie" veteran Chris Klein round out the cast. Or that Don Cheadle turns up for the second time in less than a year as a flawed, caring counselor to troubled teens (on the heels of last year’s "Manic").

The theme—that sometimes people do "bad" things for no reason—is not as original or provocative as first time director Hoge imagines, and characters who do things for unexplainable reasons seldom make for satisfying movie anti-heroes. Hoge won’t supply any real meanings to Leland’s neuroses, other than suggesting he’s the product of divorce, and the result becomes a tedious exercise in dead-end teen analysis that intentionally chooses not to end up anywhere substantial.

Gosling, arguably the most talented young actor of his generation, isn’t given much to work with. In the past, he’s displayed a gifted virtuosity with both frighteningly real ("The Believer") and flamboyantly lurid ("Murder by Numbers") criminals. In ‘Leland,’ however, the removed introspection and deliberate non-committal nature of the character, intended to be complex, ends up seeming remote and underwritten.